Video games rarely deliver a good inner journey, and it should be viewed as a weakness. From the Doom Guy to Samus to (for the most part) the Master Chief, game protagonists are frequently as emotionally blank as their helmet visors. They have to remain pretty much the same person at the end of the game so that they're ready to begin the sequel. And that character's emotional depth typically has to be limited to a narrow range between cold-blooded toughness and vengeful rage because that's what's most comfortable for the FPS genre. I find stories like The Last of Us, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Tomb Raider refreshing for their departure from those tropes. With rare exception, female protagonists have much more nuanced and rewarding inner journeys.
I just finished playing Knights and Bikes with my 4-year-old daughter. I know the game is a little older and It Takes Two is all the rage, but I didn't see any reviews that really remarked on its narrative, and there are some truly profound elements within it that I think inform how people should approach the inner journey for ALL games.
The other reviews I've read do the game a disservice. Yes, the gameplay is pretty simple. Yes, the puzzles frequently offer a mix of over-obvious solutions and forcing you to look under too many couch cushions for the key. But I think all those reviews are based on adults who know what Portal is. I got to enjoy it with a 4-year-old girl. And from that perspective, it's nigh game-of-the-year status.
Honestly, I was totally fine with the gameplay because it was just challenging enough for my daughter that I played as her Obi-Wan Kenobi most of the way, telling her which way to go, helping her through puzzle actions, and protecting her during boss battles. More than anything, we were utterly riveted to the game's story. The ease of play kept her encouraged and the story beats kept her on the edge of her seat.
For a quick overview, the game follows two young girls, Demelza and Vanessa, around the small northern British island town of Penfurzy. Demelza's mother has recently died and her father, who runs a local campground, is in a deep depression. Vanessa arrives at the island by stowing away on a ship and indicates that she's an orphan or a runaway from abuse. After finding a book left by Demelza's mother indicating that a local legend about an ancient knight's treasure is real, the girls go in search of its hidden location. A curse put on the treasure seeks to keep it protected, and begins attacking the whole island. The girls must find the treasure to save Demelza's dad from financial ruin and help Vanessa live at the campground.
That's the physical journey. Emotionally, the girls actually deal with a LOT. I was surprised at just how much ground the team that made this game covered in the span of a relatively small map and short amount of gameplay time. The girls confess their deepest fears and regrets to each other, deal with the loss of a parent, and even have a falling out. Anyone who overlooks that a co-op puzzler includes a story beat in which the characters stop cooperating is missing a stroke of genius. The game even takes control of the characters away at certain moments to reflect how their anger makes them lose control. It's like haptic feedback for emotional distress. These were little things that really fed the emotional journey. That contributes to the moment when the girls do eventually make up. It enhances your ability to feel real growth in that moment. When Vanessa gets control of her anger, you get control of her back. It is a profound mind-meld of character and player.
While the challenges along the way are easily solved, each and every one is attached to a beat in Vanessa and Demelza's relationship. The game embraces 80s nostalgia and the story follows the best traditions of films like Stand By Me, The Goonies, and Stranger Things. The story does an amazing job of requiring the girls at one point to steal a car to get away from the curse. They wind up totaling it and getting themselves and their dad into even deeper trouble. So while the player succeeds, the character fails and kicks the whole thing into high gear for the third act. Dad can't pay for the car and decides to sell the trailer park to cover the expenses. Now Demelza is on the verge of losing everything that she's been trying to save for the entire game. That transition is played out with a beautiful level of realism in the narrative, in terms of how kids would feel about doing something so wrong and reacting to consequences so severe. My daughter was in absolute fits over this twist. We had to play nightly to get the treasure. Taking breaks was letting Demelza down. It was thrilling to see her so excited about it.
Which is why the ending was especially disappointing. I hate to say it, but it failed to stick the landing on so many fronts. As the girls close in on the treasure, they find the haunted "pickled head" of the decapitated knight who buried the treasure. While he guides them to the hidden keep where it's buried, he frequently teases that he'll be the final boss-fight once reattached to his body. The girls also begin arguing over what exactly to do with the treasure. They each obviously have compelling motivations to get at it and you feel torn over which problems should get solved. I was watching my daughter nervously throughout the whole dungeon run, thinking we were headed for a huge battle that would force us to give either one girl or the other the happily-ever-after.
Instead, we got no boss fight, the choice was taken from us, and the happily-ever-after was replaced with a rather unsatisfying deus ex machina.
The pickled knight head winds up being inspired by the girls to make amends for his ancient sins and opens the treasure for the girls before disappearing. That was unexpected, and while it probably made life easier for my daughter gameplay-wise, it really felt like the girls deserved the chance to engage in a final battle and physically manifest everything they'd developed in their relationship along the way. Alas.
But the worst part came in the end. With the castle crumbling, the girls discover that the treasure is actually the magical ability to live forever. In a cut scene that tries to do way too much way too fast, Demelza gets angry that her mom for not having obtained the treasure to prevent her death, comes to terms with it, and realizes that she also doesn't want immortality because that would prevent her from changing as a person. Instead, she embraces the value of growth and decides she will continue on the journey to adulthood.
Pouring salt into that wound is Vanessa's ending. After getting over her distrust of the world and establishing the first real friendship of her life, she decides that her destiny lies with the treasure. She walks into the light coming from the chest and disappears.
The dungeon crumbles and Demelza wakes up back on the surface above to find a rescue helicopter picking her up. Her dad is suddenly inexplicably better and ready to leave Penfurzy behind. They'll go to the "mainland" where the helicopter pilot says that he has a daughter Demelza's age that would love to meet her. It's kind/of-sort/of implied that it might be Vanessa. You can tell the writer was going for some kind of magical ending there, but it's not clear enough to get what they were aiming for.
Demelza's turn is a good and believable twist, but I couldn't believe at how rushed it was in the delivery. The game was so well-paced throughout, and there was plenty of time in the final dungeon to deliver that change in the character along the way. To get it all in one cutscene just robbed me of the ability to appreciate it emotionally because I had to focus so much on processing it cognitively.
As for Vanessa, it seemed totally out of her character to abandon the first and only friend she's ever had. Especially when the entire game has been building up to keeping them together. The game didn't do itself any favors by having the dad in the final scene imply that Vanessa was just a figment of Demelza's imagination the entire time. While the boss fight - get the treasure - happily-ever-after sequence was much more predictable, I think it would have been more satisfying than what happened. The game went for big surprises and wound up ruining suspension of disbelief. At least for me.
But in the end, even that failure is informative to the overall development of narrative arcs for characters in games. Could there be a sequel to this game? Absolutely. Demelza will be changed, much like the character of Eleven is in Stranger Things from season to season. She'd necessarily have a different sidekick (I guess), as would the kids in the show. And that'd be okay. I don't need the character to be the same. I only need her to be interesting, and she is certainly that.
I would play a sequel to this game because of the strength of the writing and the way in which the gameplay team really worked with the narrative. I get it that this was an indie game. It didn't have a billion-dollar budget to throw at level development and combat systems. And that wasn't what they wanted to achieve with it in the first place. Instead, the team invested its energy into creating a synthesis between the character's physical and spiritual journey. It was chicken soup for the gamer's soul, and so many games would be so much better if they could. Given how comparatively little resources this team put into it, you'd think that the AAA developers could break off a little more change to do the same.
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