Research

Walden, a game - Research

The game features a wide exploration encyclopedia which allows players to explore nearly everything in the game and document it down. This is effective in that it renders what is meant to be a real world experiment as belonging to the real world; the game effectively places you in Thoreau's shoes and lets you roam around and explore almost anything. Each time you explore a certain object, the game also holds an extensive description of that object in Thoreau’s words. This makes the immersive experience more intimate and real and makes the player feel as though they are walking around the forest themselves in self thought considering their surroundings and documenting them as they go. Nevertheless, a certain action does break this immersion; whenever Thoreau bends over to pick up an arrowhead, he reaches out with his (and your) hand in what seems to be an organic manner, only to stop short of the arrowhead and perform a grabbing gesture, after which the arrowhead disappears and the silence is broken with a monologue by Thoreau. This serves to break the immersion in two ways. Firstly, it is jarring to see your hands appear suddenly only to not even work properly as you find out you cannot actually pick up the arrowhead. Secondly, the burst of monologue in Thoreau’s speech after grabbing the arrowhead feels a little off as when you inspect items and objects there is no audible voice yet you feel as though you are thinking what the description is saying. However, the inclusion of speech here breaks this feeling. 

In terms of audio, the game smartly decides to not include an underlying soundtrack and opts to use the sounds of footsteps crunching grass as well as other natural sounds, like birds chirping and owls hooting. This creates a nice atmospheric backdrop to what is ultimately a game about being out in the outdoors. Upon playing the game further, one can notice subtle organs playing in the background, like a more classical soundtrack would have. This adds a nice touch to the atmosphere as, after a certain point, having no sound but the chirping of birds and rustling of leaves can become monotone and bland. 

The inclusion of a hint/explanatory UI whenever an event occurs is a useful, although synthetic, way of helping out the player with the mechanics of the game and what they could possibly do in the game. Indeed, the game itself is simple in its functionality but there are no real indicators as to what you can do in the world. The inclusion of these hints thus provides a helpful way of explaining how the game works to the player. 

The arrowheads themselves add a nice touch in explaining the story as well as the progression of Thoreau’s experiment in the woods by including a small contemplative monologue and break from walking around the forest. However, the problem with this is that if a player chooses not to wait until the end of the monologue and seeks out more arrowheads, it breaks the telling of the story and causes a slight glitchy feeling in the audio, as the previous monologue abruptly ends to make way for the new one. The fact that you are free to roam around and inspect things while the monologue is playing is also slightly ineffective in that it loses the player’s attention. Indeed, once you start walking around and inspecting things and reading them, while Thoreau is talking in the background, it is easy to lose interest in what he is saying. 

In terms of mechanics, especially with the crafting and building tasks, the controls for carrying out tasks such as nailing a board with a hammer become strange and unintuitive. Indeed, with the example of the hammer and nails, the controls require you to have a button pressed down while moving the joystick in a specific motion every time you want to hammer a nail. This seems to be a little too complex and strange for what is such a simple task. Also it leads the action feeling very mechanical, as the player watches Thoreau hammer nails like an automaton on a conveyor belt. Furthermore, some actions, like the construction of the walls of Thoreau’s house seem to be quite repetitive and too drawn out. For example, the first building task with the hammer requires you to hammer down three nails on all four corners of what seems to be a frame. This leads the action to be too long and drawn out which can be disgruntling to more impatient players. Nevertheless, the general feel of the game, as well as its pace, is very calm and peaceful as well as somewhat relaxing. As such, perhaps players need to completely immerse themselves in this state of being as they play the game, in order to experience it fully. In contrast to this, and slightly confusingly so, the game features a faster unrealistic building mechanic where Thoreau simply hammers nails down on a piece of wood while a message pops up below to inform you that you are making good building progress. However, you cannot even see what you are building nor can you understand what it is you are hammering nails into. Once you finish the task and exit, however, you can see the progress on your building. This mechanic breaks from the slow and immersive pace of the game to be more of a simulated and unrealistic take on a real world task. 

As a conclusion, the game interestingly and progressively presents more realistic actions and tasks for Thoreau to perform, such as indicating that it is time to rest once the sun sets while also having Thoreau produce a lantern in order to illuminate the dark woods. Furthermore, having Thoreau become tired and in need of rest by a fireplace after constructing and building is another nice touch on making the game more realistic.

Cloud- Research

The game’s music is very reminiscent of Celeste or Sky’s music where the sounds are comprised of calm and serene piano key notes which create a tranquil tone and atmosphere. These sounds also serve to accentuate the feeling of longing that the game introduces in its opening sequence. It also shows the player the metaphor behind the character’s need to escape and be free from a medical condition/illness that they are facing which traps them in a hospital room. This may have the undertone of a real life experience which can be part of many people’s lives.

The game’s mechanics also seem fairly simple initially, where your character can move faster the further away you move the cursor from him. This provides a simple and fast tool of movement to grasp as simply moving the cursor around instinctively will show the player that they can indeed move faster or slower by not doing much. In terms of the cloud mechanics, moving them around and combining them with other clouds is also fairly simple but the challenge here is in seeing your character and your cursor when you are near or in the cloud. This is because the cursor looks exactly like a small cloud and its color is the same as the clouds around you. Furthermore, a message also tells the player that they will lose the cloud if they move to fast. Knowing this, it can become tedious to move around with clouds as you have to gauge the position of your cursor by feeling around with it or you will risk constantly losing the cloud and having to start over once again. Something that adds to this frustration is the fact that with certain resolutions, apparently, the zooming out mechanic that you can use to gauge distance becomes more of a hindrance than a helpful mechanic. Indeed, the zoom out is too far, leading the character to resemble a tiny spec with an even tinier spec of a cursor in front of them. This makes moving the character around extremely difficult, which makes matters worse when you have a cloud attached to you. This is an even bigger issue with areas that are larger and have more clouds to collect. 

Another problem made evident is that there is some confusion when collecting perhaps a certain amount of clouds or clouds in certain areas. This is because some clouds seem to be impossible to collect: even when you release some clouds and hit the collect button, the clouds are still grey and simply bounce off of you or move through you. This can easily cause confusion on what the player has to do to accumulate these clouds or if they are doing something wrong. Nevertheless, after playing around with the clouds in the area, the game informs the player that they need to release their clouds to create a taller cloud to capture these clouds. Even if there is a solution to this problem in the game, it is not presented to the player immediately or in an intuitive manner. Instead it is presented in white text in a sentence that does not really explain how tall clouds work. Furthermore, when you own a tall cloud it does not behave in the same way: it does not follow the player around as fluidly as regular clouds do, making it hard to navigate.

When it comes to adding up clouds, the game does it in a nice and subtle manner. Indeed, lonesome clouds appear semi transparent and greyed, allowing the player to easily note which ones have yet to be added to their main cloud. Once the player enters a lonesome cloud it instantly becomes white and whooshes around a little, while there is a subtle sound effect which gives the player feedback as to what has just happened. For a game that is generally fairly simple to play from the beginning, it is good to add more subtle and immersive effects and feedback instead of overly expending on the juiciness of feedback. On another note, there is a feeling of redundancy and arbitrariness in having to absorb the clouds that you have just collected. Indeed, the game separates the function of herding all the clouds as one giant cloud and absorbing them into the character into two different tasks. This, personally, seems to be meaningless and just adding an extra unnecessary task due to the fact that you already spent time collecting the clouds.

Continuing with the cloud mechanic, the reward of being able to draw an image with the clouds you have gathered is a nice and satisfying conclusion to your time spent herding. This presents a more interesting reward in comparison to having, let’s say a speed score or a point system.

In terms of environment and level design, the game appears to be reveling in its simplicity, which ultimately has good and bad results. Indeed, the positive result is that the simplicity of the landscape (mostly open water and a few lowpoly and empty islands below you) adds to the calmness and ease of the game in that the player does not have to be stressed about exploring a complex world while they perform a simple task. The negative result lies in the fact that the simplicity of the environment, combined with the simple mechanic of combining clouds makes the game feel a little bland and uneventful.